title: Using SNOMED CT to represent two interface terminologies.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Interface terminologies are designed to support interactions between humans and structured medical information. In particular, many interface terminologies have been developed for structured computer based documentation systems. Experts and policy-makers have recommended that interface terminologies be mapped to reference terminologies. The goal of the current study was to evaluate how well the reference terminology SNOMED CT could map to and represent two interface terminologies, MEDCIN and the Categorical Health Information Structured Lexicon (CHISL).
  
  
  METHODS
  Automated mappings between SNOMED CT and 500 terms from each of the two interface terminologies were evaluated by human reviewers, who also searched SNOMED CT to identify better mappings when this was judged to be necessary. Reviewers judged whether they believed the interface terms to be clinically appropriate, whether the terms were covered by SNOMED CT concepts and whether the terms' implied semantic structure could be represented by SNOMED CT.
  
  
  METHODS
  Outcomes included concept coverage by SNOMED CT for study terms and their implied semantics. Agreement statistics and compositionality measures were calculated.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The SNOMED CT terminology contained concepts to represent 92.4% of MEDCIN and 95.9% of CHISL terms. Semantic structures implied by study terms were less well covered, with some complex compositional expressions requiring semantics not present in SNOMED CT. Among sampled terms, those from MEDCIN were more complex than those from CHISL, containing an average 3.8 versus 1.8 atomic concepts respectively, p<0.001.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings support using SNOMED CT to provide standardized representations of information created using these two terminologies, but suggest that enriching SNOMED CT semantics would improve representation of the external terms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville-TN, USA. trent.rosenbloom@vanderbilt.edu
authors.forename: S Trent
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Rosenbloom
authors.forename: Steven H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Froehling
authors.forename: Brent A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Bauer
authors.forename: Dietlind L
authors.initials: DL
authors.lastname: Wahner-Roedler
authors.forename: William M
authors.initials: WM
authors.lastname: Gregg
authors.forename: Peter L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Elkin
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D012660:Semantics; D039061:Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled